Abstract
When the nation’s leader assured citizens gripped by the difficulties of the Great Depression that they had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” he needed to immediately manufacture substantiation.1 The source of such optimism might be most readily found in the spirit of Americans’ propensity for hard work and innovation. However, after discussing this fact, the leader made an extension that drew directly from his own passion and experience for the natural environment. “Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it,” he continued. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.”
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Notes
The most effective discussion of FDR’s life with polio is Richard Thayer Goldberg, The Making of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Cambridge: Abt Books, 1981).
There is no shortage of biographies of Franklin during each stage in his life. For this analysis, I have used Geoffrey C. Ward, A First Class Temperament (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).
This sensibility was well known in Jefferson’s writings. Most famously, he referred to agriculturalists as “the chosen people of God.” For a discussion of these points, see Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
heodore was second cousin to Franklin and uncle to Eleanor. He gave Eleanor away at her wedding to Franklin. See Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt, the Making of a Conservationist (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 264.
Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
See Nash, Wilderness or Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Richard White, essay “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?: Work and Nature,” contained in William Cronon, Uncommon Ground (New York: Norton, 1996), 171–73.
Historians have explored this connection. See, e.g., A.L. Riesch Owen, Conservation Under F.D.R. (New York: Praeger, 1983).
Edgar B. Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, 1911–1945 (Washington DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1957).
Roosevelt, Elliott, ed., FDR, His Personal Letters, Early Years (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), 459.
John Morton Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 10–20
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© 2005 Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner
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Black, B. (2005). The Complex Environmentalist: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Ethos of New Deal Conservation. In: Henderson, H.L., Woolner, D.B. (eds) FDR and The Environment. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100671_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100671_3
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